The invention relates to rapidly and intuitively conveying information about the spatial location of an observed object or event to one or more listeners by projecting the apparent sound of a verbal message to the location referred to by that message, thus enhancing the listener's ability to rapidly identify and appropriately react to the object or event occurring at that location.
In many tasks that involve real-time coordination between two or more remotely located individuals, the need arises for one person to rapidly and intuitively convey information about the spatial location of an observed object or event to one or more listeners. As an example, consider the case of a military operation where a pilot located in a helicopter spots an enemy sniper hidden in the window of a building in a crowded urban environment. In such a situation, it is extremely urgent for the pilot to communicate both the location of the threat and its description to friendly troops on the ground in the most efficient manner possible.
With current communication systems, the pilot has a number of possible options for the communication of this information. The pilot may provide a verbal description of the location of the threat, typically with a radio, with references to local landmarks that are visible both to the observer and to the troops on the ground. For example, the pilot might say “There's a sniper on the roof of the building with the blue awning to the right of the third vehicle in the caravan north bound on Alpha Street.” This approach has a number of major drawbacks. There can be considerable ambiguity in the interpretation of the landmarks in the description (e.g., “did he mean that building with the blue awning?”). The description requires the listener to spend time scanning the environment for landmarks when that time would be better spent searching for cover; and depending on their relative locations, listeners located in different orientations relative to the threat may require different verbal descriptions to find the relevant location.
Another possible approach is for the observer to perform the necessary geometric calculations and determine the location of the threat relative to the location of the listener using range and bearing information. For example, the pilot could tell a listener that the threat is located 500 m to the north. This approach is less ambiguous than the verbal description approach, but it also has serious challenges. First, it requires the observer to know precisely where the listener is located, which may not always be the case in real-world situations. Second, it requires the observer to make time-consuming, cumbersome, and potentially error-prone calculations about the relative locations of the threat and the listener. Finally, it can only be applied to a single listener at a time. If it is necessary to convey the information to two listeners, one located east of the threat and one located north of the threat, two different calculations and two different verbal communications will be necessary.
The pilot may alternatively provide a GPS coordinate of the threat. This approach provides unambiguous information about the location of the threat, but also has substantial drawbacks. First, it requires the observer to obtain the GPS coordinates of the threat, which may not be immediately accessible if the target is visually detected out of the window of a helicopter. Second, it requires the successful communication of a complex string of numbers, which may result in miscommunication or possible incorrect transcription by the listener (who almost certainly will need to write down the coordinates in order to remember them). And third, it requires the listener to determine his or her own GPS location and apply a complicated mathematical calculation to determine the relative location of the threat.
A more technologically advanced approach to the problem would be for the observer to identify the GPS location of the threat with a location-determining device such as a laser rangefinder, and use a data network to transmit this information to a computer display at the location of the listener, thus placing a visual icon on the location of a moving map displayed to the observer on a screen. This approach provides unambiguous location information with little chance for transcription errors, but it requires the operator to view a screen and making a potentially cumbersome translation between a map display and the surrounding terrain when that time would be better spent either taking cover of visually scanning the environment for the threat.
None of these approaches are successful in achieving the true goal of the observer, which is to 1) verbally convey the location of the threat in a manner that is completely intuitive to all the potential listeners in the environment and 2) allow them to react immediately without pausing to perform any geometric calculations to determine the relative location of the threat. The remote auditory spatial communication aid described herein has numerous advantages over the existing techniques in the prior art for addressing this problem, including faster response time, fewer chances for human error, compatibility with other heads-up, eyes-out, hands-on tasks, and greatly reduced operator workload.